The modular blockchain platform Celestia has successfully completed a fundraising round, raising $100 million and bringing its total capital raised to $155 million.

Celestia Foundation, the organization behind the modular blockchain protocol Celestia (TIA), announced on September 24th that it had closed the latest round of funding. Major crypto investment firms, such as Bain Capital Crypto, Syncracy Capital, 1kx, Robot Ventures, and Placeholder, participated in this round. The substantial raise marks one of the largest in the crypto industry in recent months.

As a pioneer in modular blockchain technology, Celestia was launched in October 2023. The platform allows other blockchains to scale more efficiently by reducing their data availability requirements. In less than a year, Celestia has developed an ecosystem supporting more than 20 rollups, with its "blob" data blocks accounting for over half of all data uploaded by these rollups.

In addition, Celestia has announced plans to expand its block size to 1 GB, which would significantly increase the data storage capacity for blockchains operating within its ecosystem. This expansion aims to achieve transaction speeds of 24,000 TPS (transactions per second), comparable to Visa's payment network.

Mustafa Al-Bassam, co-founder of Celestia, remarked, "When Celestia launched last year as the first modular data availability layer, we rapidly expanded block space, ushering in a new era of bandwidth expansion for the crypto industry. Now, developers are working to scale block space to the level of fiber optic Internet while maintaining low-latency and easily verifiable data."

Despite a recent dip in Celestia’s TIA token, which had been following the broader market trend over the past three months, the fundraising news has led to a 20% surge in TIA’s value over the past 24 hours.

Looking ahead, Celestia is preparing for a major token unlock event at the end of October. This unlock will release 175.74 million TIA tokens, valued at approximately $1.2 billion based on current prices. These tokens represent 16.4% of the total supply and 82.4% of the current market cap.

There have been rumors on social media platform X (formerly Twitter) suggesting that the recent fundraising round was actually an OTC (over-the-counter) deal that took place months earlier, coinciding with the upcoming token unlock in late October.